(uplifting music) - [Narrator] Years ago, a Milwaukee city planner was leaving for a job in Denver, and a radio host asked what he missed most about Milwaukee.

"The tree-lined streets," he said.

I knew exactly what he meant, because I love them too, especially Newberry Boulevard.

(upbeat jazz music) There are streets you take, because they get you somewhere.

And there are streets that are somewhere.

(uplifting music) (birds chirping) Newberry is one of those.

The mile-long, green corridor, sometimes referred to as the Emerald Necklace, stretches between two Frederick Law Olmsted designed parks.

The connecting boulevard feels less like a roadway than a living colonnade.

Elms and maples, maples and elms repeat.

A procession of trunks and branches rising up and reaching toward one another overhead in leafy prayer.

Summer, an awesome awning, a green roof-stitched canopy of crowns.

Winter, the bare branches live modeling, twisting against the sky each in its own way every season.

Always beautiful.

Nightfall brings another kind of magic, amber light filtering through the treetops gilding the street below.

(uplifting music) The tree-lined street does more than just decorate.

It's beauty with benefits.

Shade, habitat, cleaner air, and cooler temps they soften the noise and heat of the city.

But the real gift may be the invitation to slow down, to gather together in the median lawn, to walk, read, sprawl, throw a football, to stay a while, all along this green ribbon.

Maybe loving a place is mostly an act of attention, of finding something remarkable in the familiar.

I think, that's rooted in all of us.

That city planner was right.

The things that make a place special are often the easiest to overlook, maybe because they've been there all along, standing quietly beside us.